From: seobythesea.com

Not too long ago, if you entered in Google the phrase (without quotation marks) “a room with a view,” you might have received some warnings that your query contained “Stop Words.”

Stop words are words that appear so frequently in documents and on web pages that search engines would often ignore them when indexing the words on pages. These could be words like: a, and, is, on, of, or, the, was, with.

Good bye to stop words?

In that search for “a room with a view,” you might have received results like “a room for a view,” or “room to view,” or other phrases that replaced some stop words with others. That made it less likely to find exactly what you were looking for when you searched for a phrase with stop words in it.

I’m not seeing Google ignoring stop words any more. Last week, Dan Thies asked Stop Words Are Dead! Did I Miss Another Memo?

This newly granted Google Patent seems to hold some answers to the disappearance of stop words, and to potentially a number of other indexing issues from Google:

Document compression scheme that supports searching and partial decompression
Invented by Olcan Sercinoglu
Assigned to Google
US Patent 7,319,994
Granted January 15, 2008
Filed May 23, 2003

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searchnewz.com

Google Rankings Drive Sales. Thats what a caller told me this morning. Lets call him Chuck, from Massachusetts, to preserve his anonymity.

A year ago his website was at #1 in Google for an important keyword in a somewhat competitive consumer market and now its dropped to #3. His sales during the same period had seen a 20% decline. He asked me whether I could help to correct this situation.

By coincidence, Sandra Niehaus has just published a related post entitled, Why Isnt EVERYONE #1 on Google? She wrote it for all those SEO professionals who have been asked whether they can guarantee a #1 ranking on Google. Theres some excellent advice there. It all relates to Setting Client Expectations for SEO and what it can achieve. Part of that included what might be called Reasonable Expectations

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IT MAY now be the most coveted real estate on the web - the top ranking in Google for a competitive search phrase. But even the world’s richest marketers cannot lease this inventory.

Google’s goal is to deliver the most relevant information for any search query, and if it happens to be some teenager’s blog rather than a corporate website, that is how the cyber cookie crumbles.

Relevance is not for sale.

But early on, a small group of webmasters and marketers discovered that search relevance could be altered by exerting control over the hundreds of variables that search engines use to rank webpages.

During the past decade, this effort to improve a site’s ranking has gained a name. They call it search engine optimisation (SEO) and, according to the Search Engine Marketing Professional Organization (SEMPO), it was an industry worth $US9.4 billion ($A11.7 billion) in 2006.

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forbes.com

If your online business, like thousands of others on the Web, relies on Google searches for traffic, then Brendon Scott is a good person to have on your side.

For a price, he can boost a site to the top of Google (nasdaq: GOOG - news - people ) search results for lucrative search terms, attracting crowds of customers. And better to have Scott working for you than for your competitors. Because occasionally, Scott says, he takes a less friendly approach: reducing a competing site’s visibility to searchers–or making it seem to disappear from search results altogether.

Scott offers what he and some other search marketers call “negative search engine optimization” or “negative SEO,” a harmless-sounding term that amounts to sabotaging a Web site’s ranking in search engine results. Sometimes negative SEO is performed for reputation management, tweaking online content so that it floats to the top of Google or Yahoo! (nasdaq: YHOO - news - people ) results, thereby pushing a critic’s negative comments to a lower ranking. But in rare cases, Scott says, negative SEO involves more nefarious means, convincing Google or Yahoo!’s search algorithms to bury a competitor’s site deep within search results, where its traffic practically evaporates.

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www.promotionworld.com

Dave Davies is CEO of Beanstalk Inc. Seo Services and one of the most knowledgeable and successful Seo Providers in the industry.

Anybody who monitors their rankings with the same vigor that we in the SEO community do will have noticed some fairly dramatic shifts in the algorithm starting last Thursday (July 5th) and continuing through the weekend. Many sites are rocketing into the top 10 which, of course, means that many sites are being dropped at the same time. We were fortunate not to have any clients on the losing end of that equation however we have called and emailed the clients who saw sudden jumps into the top positions to warn them that further adjustments are coming. After a weekend of analysis there are some curiosities in the results that simply require further tweaks in the ranking system.

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